Jim Zarroli

Jim Zarroli is a business reporter for NPR News, based at NPR's New York bureau.

He covers economics and business news including fiscal policy, the Federal Reserve, the job market and taxes

Over the years, he's reported on recessions and booms, crashes and rallies, and a long string of tax dodgers, insider traders and Ponzi schemers. He's been heavily involved in the coverage of the European debt crisis and the bank bailouts in the United States.

Prior to moving into his current role, Zarroli served as a New York-based general assignment reporter for NPR News. While in this position he covered the United Nations during the first Gulf War. Zarroli added to NPR's coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the London transit bombings and the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center.

Before joining the NPR in 1996, Zarroli worked for the Pittsburgh Press and wrote for various print publications.

Office of Government Ethics Director Walter M. Shaub Jr. is recommending an investigation and possible disciplinary action be taken against Kellyanne Conway, senior adviser to President Trump, for urging shoppers to buy fashion products sold by Trump's daughter Ivanka.

Kellyanne Conway, a top adviser to President Trump, may have violated federal ethics rules Thursday when she urged shoppers to buy Ivanka Trump's retail brand, following the decision by several retail companies to drop the line because of poor sales.

"Go buy Ivanka's stuff, is what I was [saying] — I hate shopping and I'm going to go get some myself today," Conway said in an interview on Fox & Friends.

The Defense Department's plan to lease space in Manhattan's Trump Tower is already raising ethical concerns, with critics saying it would give the nation's chief executive another way to profit off his new role.

"It creates the appearance that President Trump, through his businesses, may directly benefit financially from charging the Department of Defense to do its job," says Meredith McGehee, chief of policy, programs and strategy at Issue One, a nonprofit that works to remove money from politics.

Leaders in the U.S. technology sector say President Trump's executive order banning immigrants from some Muslim-majority countries will sow confusion in their businesses and undercut the diversity that has been a linchpin of the industry's growth.

The CEOs of Google, Twitter, Facebook and Apple all issued statements condemning the ban and complaining that the order was pushed through so quickly it left great uncertainty about the status of some of their best employees.

Today, a team of legal scholars and former government ethics officials filed suit in federal court alleging that President Trump's many business interests violate the constitution. We'll hear from one of those lawyers in a moment.

A team of ethics experts and legal scholars filed a lawsuit in federal court Monday morning that says President Trump's overseas businesses violate the Constitution's Emoluments Clause, which bars presidents from taking money from foreign governments.

President-elect Donald Trump takes office on Friday having largely failed to address concerns about the many conflicts of interest posed by his business interests.

Although Trump has settled a few of the outstanding legal and regulatory disputes hanging over him, he remains in the unusual position of presiding over countless policy decisions that will affect his own businesses.

These days, plenty of consulting firms make money peddling advice on cybersecurity. Only one is run by a man designated special adviser to the president of the United States.

Earlier this month, President-elect Donald Trump named former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who heads a cybersecurity practice at the Miami-based law firm Greenberg-Traurig, as his chief adviser on cybersecurity issues.

Some prominent conservatives have signed on to a letter warning President-elect Donald Trump that he needs to sell off his businesses to address his many conflicts of interest.

"Respectfully, you cannot serve the country as president and also own a world-wide business enterprise, without seriously damaging the presidency," says a letter sent Monday by a bipartisan group of politicians, ethics advocates and academics.

As Donald Trump prepares to become president, he's promising to explain how he'll deal with the many conflicts of interest posed by his businesses and charitable foundation, even as he insists they pose "no big deal."

But short of selling his properties and putting the proceeds in a blind trust, it's not clear that Trump can completely resolve the controversies over his many businesses.

President-elect Donald Trump insists he can do all the business deals he wants while serving in the White House, but a 2012 law barring insider trading by government officials could make doing so a lot more complicated.

Trump Tower, the building that President-elect Donald Trump calls home, bills itself as "one of the world's elite luxury residences, catering to public figures, athletes, celebrities and other affluent sophisticates."

These days, some other people have taken up residence there as well: Secret Service agents.

Trump has said that his family won't move into the White House right away and will remain, for a few months at least, in the world-famous steel-and-glass office and residential building where they occupy three floors.

President-elect Donald Trump should divest himself of his vast business interests in order to avoid conflicts of interest while in the White House, according to a letter from the U.S. Office of Government Ethics.

Moreover, transferring ownership of his businesses to his grown children wouldn't go far enough to address the conflicts, the letter said.

President-elect Donald Trump suggested Sunday that he will not sell off his business operations to avoid conflicts of interest during his presidency. He said he will instead allow his grown children to manage them.

"My executives will run it with my children. It's a big company. It's a great company. But I'm going to have nothing to do with management," Trump told Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday.

Donald Trump was elected president promising to use his business-world experience and negotiating skills to help boost the American economy. Now that he's about to take office, a lot of people hope he'll leave the business world behind.

Two-thirds of those responding to a Bloomberg News poll said they think Trump needs to choose between being president and being a businessman, to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest.

He was a flamboyant, alpha-male billionaire who said things no career politician ever would — someone who promised to use his business savvy to reform the system and bring back jobs. Voters believed that his great wealth insulated him from corruption, because he couldn't be bought.

But his administration was marked by criminal investigations and crony capitalism.